Video surveillance drags massive storage wherever it goes

Dot Hill’s US Army contract reported by Byte and Switch points to a big increase in data collected and exploited by the military over the next few years.  A key driver will be integration of surveillance data into battlefield and strategic decision making.

Sound familiar?  The video surveillance data tsunami that has already washed over the Gaming industry has reached the military’s shore. 

Look at video’s effect on casino storage:

• Sixteen surveillance cameras can churn out 11 terabytes of data in 90 days - all of which must be kept on hand. 
• Higher resolution video analytics can up that to 44 terabytes.
• Most casinos use a lot more than sixteen cameras.

A new universal storage need

Video surveillance is racing into the mainstream as well.  This is a high growth, high capacity space to grow your storage business.

You don’t have to look far  to participate - uh, your customers?

DFS-hidden data can be found by Microsoft Vista, Word and Google Desktop

You may be in denial if you think a Deniable File System (DFS) will fully secure your data.  So says Byte and Switch today, based on a study by British Telecom’s Bruce Schneier and a team of researchers from the University of Washington.  They were able to expose DFS-hidden data with Microsoft Vista, Word, and Google desktop.  

Fully ecrypted hard drives are not affected

Don’t worry -  this chink in data security does not apply to drives using Full Disk Encryption (FDE) .

Keeps your data “somewhere between New York and London” so it’s safe and cheap to manage

Leave the urban data center hosting problems of high energy cost, aging infrastructure and complex regulation behind.  Start fresh in the wilds of Canada…at an undisclosed location called “Dataville“. 

Bastionhost seems to be having success with this colorful business plan. It seems their customers don’t care where their data is, as long as it’s given the respect it deserves - and they can get to it.  All the better if the data center can get really cheap power and use groundwater-based cooling. 

Ya gotta love a truly unique idea!  Looks more like a cold war missile silo than a data center, but that’s OK.

SAS drives are thriving outside the data center, despite SATA’s cost advantage 

Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) was created to replace SCSI, the long-standing enterprise hard drive interface.  It has done that, but there have been sightings far from the datacenter.  Places like Ravelry, a seemingly  home-hosted knitting website: 

Rather than shrink in the face of lower priced SATA drives, SAS drives are expanding into SATA’s domain.  What’s going on here? 

• SATA compatibility.  SATA drives interoperate with SAS, so many entry server backplanes and PC motherboards are switching to SAS to cover both interfaces.  This has created a virtual “Storage Foreign Exchange Program” as SATA drives are adopted in the enterprise, and SAS drives are tried in homes and small businesses.
• Cost.  New 1 TB 7200 RPM SAS drives like the Seagate Barracuda ES.2 cost about $50 more than their SATA equivalents. 
• Capacity.  The newest SAS enterprise-class drives like Seagate’s 450GB Cheetah 15K.6 offer more capacity than past enterprise drives.  This makes them more affordable on a cost-per-GB basis.
• Physical size.  The server market has adopted 2.5″ SAS drives en masse, and the storage system market will follow.  These drives use a lot less power and space than conventional enterprise drives without sacrificing performance.  There are no reasonable SATA 2.5″ alternatives today.

If you’re still stuck in a SCSI/SATA mindset, consider a crash course on SAS. 

Who’s replaced SATA or IDE with SAS recently?

500GB, 7200 rpm - who needs 3.5″?

Seagate announced two new 500GB notebook drives.  So what?

• The 50-year history of the disk drive is all about cramming more and more bytes on less and less real estate.  The real estate shrinks when drive formats drop a size.
• 500GB 2.5″ drives mean we’re close to not needing the capacity advantage of 3.5″ drives. It’s the beginning of the end for the 3.5″ form factor.  Servers have mostly made the switch with 2.5 SAS drives like Seagate’s Savvio.
• 500GB 2.5″ 7200 rpm drives mean notebooks can get desktop performance without sacrificing capacity.  Expect rapid adoption of 7200 rpm vs. 5400 rpm in notebooks now that there is capacity parity and less of a premium in power consumption.

The world’s biggest drives just got 50% bigger

Though not near as sound-bytable as 1 TB, Seagate’s announcement of the world’s first 1.5 TB drive is big news.  The newest Barracuda  7200.11 adds 500 gigabytes to each drive in one fell swoop. It’s the biggest capacity jump in the history of disk drives. 

Expect to see 1.5 TB and 3 TB solutions start popping up in all those high-capacity hot spots: high end destop PCs, backup drives and home entertainment systems. 

UPDATE: What others are saying:Engadget, ZD Net, Daily Tech, Blocks and Files and PC World.

Next: the exabyte drive

As era-changing milestones go, the next big one will be the exabyte drive.  Extrapolating surprisingly stable historic drive capacity growth trends, an exabyte drive could be here in 2020. 

Sound crazy?  The gigabyte drive appeared as recently as 1995.  Can you remember how crazy a terabyte drive sounded then?

What are your predictions for the exabyte drive?  Form factor, speed, power, name?

Because Disk looks more and more like Tape

Chris Evans points out the challenges of disk drive capacity outgrowing performance.  Sound familiar?  Until recently, these complaints were perennially aimed at linear-access tape technology, with random-access disk in the role of savior.

As disk now faces the same “can’t get the data out fast enough” problem, the solution is clear: SSDs.  Flash is the new access king in storage.  Or will be, because early products are struggling with reliability, write performance, and other capabilities that disk drive device and interface technology have fine-tuned over the decades. You can’t expect a breakthrough technology to hit the ground running.

Yesterday I found this Microsoft presentation in the blogosphere on the topic from 2006: flash_is_good

I guess I wasn’t original with my “Disk is the New Tape” thing.  Makes the idea all the more interesting! 

Next question:  Is there room in the flash future for SSD, Disk and  Tape?

Thanks to Ruptured Monkey for this campy but cool IBM video from the Fifities on how their RAMAC (and the disk drive) was created.

(photo courtesy of IBM.com)

The difference between specifications and reality

Tom’s Hardware compared the power draw of SSDs and 7200 rpm disk drives in notebooks under real-world usage scenarios.  The SSD-based notebooks had shorter battery life! 

How can this be, given that the idle and active power ratings of both devices are comparable?

Disk drives almost always run at or close to idle power consumption rates.  SSDs do not.  Read the Tom’s Hardware post for a detailed explanation.

This throws another bucket of the cold water of Reality on notebook SSD hype. 

The lesson here is to thoroughly evaluate new technologies like SSD in your environment before jumping off the deep end.  SSD is no doubt exciting; it just needs a little time to mature.

Can anyone confirm that their SSD laptop has less battery life than their drived version?

Seagate is a Top Five technology brand for a surprising number of IT end users

An end user IT survey by Everything Channel on CRN.com shows that disk drives aren’t as much a commodity as one might think. 

When asked what five vendors are most important for their technology provider to have a relationship with, Seagate was mentioned by a surprising number of IT folks.  All the more impressive given that Microsoft, HP and Dell take up 3 of the 5 spots for over 40% of the respondents.

For small businesses, Seagate was mentioned more than EMC, Sun, CA, SAP, Toshiba, Hitachi Data Systems and NetApp.  No other pure storage vendor (device or system) was on the list. 

Seagate had an even higher ranking on the list for medium-sized businesses.

Takeaways for a solution provider:

1.  Saying “I use Seagate drives in my systems” (if you do) is valuable to your customers.  The largest multinationals don’t do this because they need their components multisourced for a variety of reasons. Neither do most of your competitors.  Stand out in a crowd!
2. The Seagate brand can open the door for your external storage business.  There’s huge growth for NAS and backup solutions in small businesses that can’t afford or don’t want to hassle with “enterprise” storage from the typical vendor list.  Seagate’s Maxtor One Touch, Maxtor BlackArmor and Maxtor Shared Storage are ready-to-rock, entry-level business storage solutions from one of your customers’ favorite brands. 

What are you waiting for?